


Lies and Omission and Morality in the MCU

by Kizmet



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Analysis, Essays, Gen, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 03:10:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14155374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kizmet/pseuds/Kizmet
Summary: These days it’s basically impossible to think about the MCU without  thinking about the morality of lying.  So what does an analysis of the lies told, and how those lies are viewed in the MCU, say about when it’s okay to lie and when lying is a horrible sin?





	Lies and Omission and Morality in the MCU

**Author's Note:**

> Because I was in a weird mood this week.

These days it’s basically impossible to think about the MCU without thinking about the morality of lying. So what does an analysis of the lies told, and how those lies are viewed in the MCU, say about when it’s okay to lie and when lying is a horrible sin?

**Data Collection**

Here are the rules of the game, aka the parameters under which I assembled my data: The lie has to be told by someone considered a good guy. The one exception is Loki, God of Lies, I threw him in as a baseline: How frequently does a character lie when compared to the God of Lies? Personally, I’m not sure that Odin should be counted as a good guy since Ragnarok confirmed most of the fandoms’ negative suspicions about him, but he’s in there too.

On counting lies: A lie told to a group or by a group counts as one lie. Fury covering up Coulson not staying dead is one lie told to the Avengers, rather than six lies told to Steve, Tony, Natasha, Clint, Bruce and Thor. The same lie told to multiple groups counts as multiple lies. Peter lying to Aunt May about being Spider-Man is a separate lie from hiding that he’s Spider-Man from his friends. While it might be okay to lie to one person, the same lie told to someone in a different relationship with the liar might have a different significance.

To keep from being overwhelmed, with lies told in support of a larger untruth are considered under an umbrella and only count once. Natasha might tell dozens of lies in the course of an undercover mission but I’m going to count the mission as one case of a hero lying. Steve Rogers has a special circumstance in that he told the same lie to the same group four times (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he didn’t lie the first time he tried to enlist). He lied and was caught in the lie. Then he went out and found a different enlistment officer and lied again: That’s four separate lies.

The following information about the lie is included in the analysis: Who told it. Who was it told to, or who was kept out of the loop with lies of omission. Was the person being lied to an authority figure, an equal or a subordinate? And the duration of time the lie was maintained.

Inside an organization who is an authority figure is generally obvious. The Avengers, with their lack of structure is a bit harder, initially I was going to go with Steve’s in charge, everyone else is an equal but I’ve seen some pretty good arguments for the other Avengers seeing Tony as an authority after CA:WS, so he is ranked as Steve’s second in command between Winter Soldier and Civil War. Someone who is in the position of acting as a representative of a government is an authority in relation to someone without an official position. Someone who is considered a child is subordinate in relation to someone who is considered an adult. For this analysis it doesn’t matter whether or not Wanda is an adult, she is considered a child, she allows herself to be considered a child, this reduces her authority in relation to others whether or not she actually is a child.

For grouping purposes Duration was broken down into: Seconds, Minutes, Days, Months, Years and Decades. Odin has a few whoppers that stood for centuries but I left it as decades. He lied about certain things for the majority of Thor and Loki’s lives, for all practical purposes they’re young adults. If their ages are converted to human years, the lies lasted for decades.

Finally the lie was graded on scale of “Endangered the Planet” (5) to “Saved the Day” (1). The gradiation was kept coarse to minimize personal bias. My goal is the rank the lie by how the MCU sees it, not how I see it or how I see it being treated. If I had a scale of 1 - 100, judging from a lot of annoying interview cannon, I’d say the MCU considers Steve withholding information about Tony’s parents being murdered at a 51-55 rank, not good but not really bad. With a coarse gradation it gets rank a 4: It’s not the worst thing ever but it is bad. This also means that while I see Steve’s fraudulent enlistment attempts something that, if they hadn’t been caught, would have endangered the lives of anyone stuck with Pre-Serum Steve in their unit and thus a bad lie, the MCU treats it as the height of nobility, so I ranked it as a 1.

Lies that go undetected tend to be ranked as neutral due to a lack of information. Viewers know that Coulson’s death didn’t stick but his name hasn’t been mentioned in the movies since Avengers so it’s hard to know if fan speculation that Clint and Natasha, at the very least, would be left grieving is an unknown. Fury didn’t know Coulson would be successfully revived during Avengers, so it wasn’t a lie when it was pulling the team together and his death has had no observable impact since then.

I left out Marvel TV because I haven’t watched everything and it’s too much data to sort through. From the three seasons of AoS that I have seen the protagonists hide things from each other almost as often as they breath. I also left out “Incredible Hulk” and both “Guardians of the Galaxy”, I can’t remember Hulk or GoG v1 well enough to include them.

**Analysis**

To provide meaningful comparisons the data had to be normalized in some way. It wouldn’t be fair to say Steve lies more than Peter based on the raw data, Steve’s had a lot more screen time in which to lie than Peter has.

I tried two different methods of normalizing the data. In the first the number of times a character lies or is lied to is divided by the total number of lies told in the movies that the character appeared in. The second method was to simply divide the number of lies they told or were told by the number of the movies they appeared in. Characters were not counted as having appeared if they only had a cameo: Fury is not counted as a character in IM1. Sam is not counted as an Ant-Man character. The results were generally similar although characters like Scott and Peter who lie, are in CA:CW and one other movie get a much higher score when it’s normalized by movies....

I get why Thor’s solo movies have high rates of lying :cough: Loki :cough:, but it’s CA:WS and CA:CW where the most lies told and CA:TFA is in the next tier down.

Once I started analyzing based on whether lies were good or bad I found that, for some characters I didn’t have an adequate data sample. Clint’s main lie, that we know of, is hiding the existence of his family, a good lie. I suspect that he didn’t tell his family before running off to play knight-in-shining-armor for Wanda but he _might_ have gotten Laura’s buy off. I also suspect that he was in on Fury not being dead but there’s no proof one way or the other. I did assume without proof that Bruce and Thor were out of the loop, because if Tony was the only one from whom it was kept then the Avengers are firmly in “What the hell assholes?” territory and I’m trying to minimize biases (based on AoU you’d think Steve and Natasha didn’t know but unless they suffered amnesia after CA:WS…)

So, to maintain adequate sample size, I limited analysis of individuals to the six biggest liars and six most frequently lied to. The six biggest liars were: Loki, Fury, Peter, Steve, Natasha and Tony. Everyone else was classified as: Other Heroes, Friends and Family of Heroes and Government Representatives (amazingly, there are good members of government in the MCU; Sharon Carter and Heimdall for example). The six who were most likely to be lied to were: Bruce, Thor, Steve, Tony, Odin and Rhodes. The rest of those being lied to were broken down into: The Public, Government Representatives, Villains, Friends and Family and Other Heroes. I counted the WCS and Killmonger as villains while Thaddeus Ross, villainous as he might be, is a legitimate government representative (hmmmm, maybe I shouldn’t count Coulson and Hill as government representatives even back before SHIELD fell).

**Results**

Loki, God of Lies, earns his title. Of the movies he's in 57% of the lies told are told by him. Fury, unsurprisingly, is second. He tells 46% of the lies. Now here's a surprise: Wholesome Peter Parker comes in next at 40%, turns out that having a secret identity is a lie generator. Captain America, the paragon of honesty and virtue, just edges out Natasha, the consummate professional spy, by telling 36% of the lies to her 35%. Tony checks in at 28%.

Bruce is the most lied to man in the MCU. 46% of the time when he's around he's the one given false information or kept out of the loop by his supposed friends. Thor comes in second at 44%. Sucks to have the God of Lies as a brother and Odin doesn't help. Well actually, Odin gets lied to about twice as often as he lies. But, apparently, he rewrote the entire history of the Nine Realms to cover up his warmongering past. Given the rules I set up that’s only one lie but what a whopper! Steve is being lied to 30% of the time he's around and Tony is being lied to 28% of the time. None of the heroes are lying to Sam but he's involved in 11% of the falsehoods when he's around.

 

When I start adding in if the lies are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, no one should be shocked to learn that, in the MCU, lying to authorities figures is generally considered a good thing. Lies told to equals average out between the good ones and the bad ones. It is generally bad to lie to your subordinates.

Since it’s okay to lie to authority figures and bad to lie to subordinates who is an authority figure in the MCU?

Odin is the Man, 100% of the time he outranks anyone he’s interacting with. Fury is next at 81%, followed by generic government representatives (71%). Then an unexpected one, even though Steve (40%) is Tony’s superior among the Avengers, Tony (41%) is slightly more likely to be interacting with others from a position of authority.

Lies that are maintained for shorter periods are more likely to be ‘good lies’ than lies that last longer.

When it comes to telling lies by the MCU’s lights Natasha and especially Steve tell mostly good ones. Fury and Peter’s frequent lies straddle the line between good and bad but with a lean towards good. Governments, Loki, Tony and people who fall into the category of “friends and family” tell predominantly bad lies.

On the other side of the equation it’s okay, good even to lie or withhold information from villains, governments, Rhodes, Bruce and Tony. Most of the lies told to Steve and Odin are bad ones. Lies told to “Friends and Family”, “The Public” and Thor are balanced between good and bad ones.

So going a little further: Steve and Tony, more than most characters both tell and are told lies frequently, but they’re opposite: Steve tells good lies, Tony tells bad lies. It’s okay to lie to Tony but bad to lie to Steve. Is that because it’s good to lie to Authorities and Tony is in a position of authority marginally more often than Steve? The difference between their rankings is nowhere near statistically significant.

Still, if that’s a factor, there should be a general trend where people who are in positions of authority tell worse lies than people who don’t have authority. There isn’t, graphing the average severity of lies against the percentage of time the person lying is in a position of authority results in a random scattering of data

 

So, if it’s not really okay to lie to people who have authority what else might make for a ‘good’ lie? I went back and instead of looking at the relationship between the liar and lie-ee, I categorized the person being lied to by their importance to the MCU: Is the lie being told to an Extra, a Supporting Character or a Main Character? Now there I get a trend, Lies told to Extras are weighted much more heavily toward good than lies total to characters who show up repeatedly and are worthy of a name.

Going back to Steve and Tony. They both tell lies regularly but 53% of the time when Steve lies it’s to people outside of the social circle of the main characters, Extras. Tony’s lies are spread around more evenly. If I look at Extras, Supporting Characters, Avengers without a solo movies and Avengers with a solo movie, Tony lies to each group between 20% and 33% of the time, which sums to Tony lying to characters who matter in the MCU 80% of the time.

**Conclusion:** That there are characters who ‘don’t really matter’, and the general public is most definitely in that group says protagonist centered morality is the order of the day in the MCU. And Tony thinks he’s Henry Higgins, where it’s not good manners or bad manners that matter but treating everyone the same.

I narrowed the focus to Steve versus Tony versus Everyone Else to see if anything more interesting than Steve knows who’s important and Tony doesn’t could be pulled out of the information. To avoid too much clutter in the data I limited the justifications for lying to: “Might Stop Them”, “Tactical Advantage”, “Might React Badly”, “Cruelty” and “Need to Know”. Expanding on that a little: “Might Stop Them” are lies told to prevent the liar from being controlled. “Tactical Advantage” are lies told to give the liar greater control over a situation. “Might React Badly” and “Cruelty” are another an opposing pair: “Might React Badly” are lies that are told to avoid upsetting the person being lied to, while “Cruelty” are lies told for the primary purpose OF causing upsetting, such as Loki telling Thor that Odin had died in “Thor 1”. “Need to know” is when information is withheld because the liar, rightly or wrongly (usually wrongly), didn’t think the other person was entitled to it.

With the way the MCU is set up, when Steve decides that he needs to lie to enable him to do... Whatever… The narrative proves him right more often than it would for any other character. Generally if Tony makes the same call he’ll be proved wrong more often than the average MCU good guy.

When Tony lies because he doesn’t want someone to take the information badly or if he doesn’t think they need to know, he’s usually in the wrong. With Steve and the rest of the universe can go either way when it comes to people reacting badly and they’re usually right about who “Need to know”.

Both Steve and Tony are in the right more often than the rest of the MCU when they lie for a tactical advantage.

The most extreme difference between Tony and Steve, when it comes to lying, is that if people want to stop Steve it’s treated as horrible and if they want to stop Tony it’s treated as being probably a good idea (just see CA:CW vs AoU).

One possible conclusion is simply that Steve’s right and Tony’s wrong but what does it look like to put their most revered/infamous lie in this category side-by-side.

They both had good primary motives. Tony had serious concerns for the wellbeing of others if he was stopped forcing him onward, he had prior experience that giving him reason to believe he could succeed and that the risks were controlled. He was being subjected to supernatural forces driving him to do something. Meanwhile Steve had a self-centered need to prove himself and every reason to expect to fail to accomplish anything good via lying. He disregard everyone else’s concerns about putting an asthmatic, TB carrier in a combat situation... Then ex deus machina descends and Steve’s decision has massively positive results and Tony’s nearly destroys the planet.

**Conclusion:** The deck is stacked against Tony and in Steve’s favor.

So how about when they’re being lied to? Well it’s not wrong to lie to get an advantage over Tony and, in general, it’s good to keep him in the dark. More often than not, it’s not good to keep Steve in the dark and it’s bad to try to get an advantage over him.

Looking for individuals cases I picked S.H.I.E.L.D. lying to Steve or Tony. In Steve’s case: 1) Attempting to hide that he’d been unconscious for seventy years. 2) Not telling him about Natasha’s separate goal in the hijacked ship mission. 3) Not telling that his interested neighbor was an agent doing surveillance on him. For Tony: 1) Withholding a message from Howard to Tony until it served their purposes to deliver it. 2) Not telling him that Fury was still alive and Hill was actually reporting to him even if Tony was paying her checks. 3) Sending Natasha to infiltrate SI so she could evaluate Tony (while acting as an agitator).

It turns out that it’s not so much that one is good and the other is bad. It’s that when S.H.I.E.L.D. is lying to Steve or manipulating him the narrative asks the question “Is this really a good thing to do?” When it’s Tony, it goes without saying that lying and manipulation is an acceptable to treat him.

**Conclusion:** People in the MCU want to treat Steve right, they don’t care about how Tony is treated.

 

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**Appendix**

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**Assumptions**

  * While Steve is Tony's team leader, withholding the information about Tony's parents seems like it's outside of their power structure.  The Authority/Subordinate/Equal classification is questionable.
  * Forget about WMD, known TERRORISTS don't get visas.  Assumption: the Avengers, Hill and Fury covered up their knowledge that Wanda had been a terrorist.
  * With Thor, Bruce and Clint out of the public eye after AoU, I excluded them from the cover-up about Wanda's terrorist past
  * The "Ant-Man and Wasp" trailer says Scott didn't tell anyone before he went to help in CACW.  Clint is more indeterminate from "Disappointing my kids"/"You did me a favor" and implied boredom with retirement bits, I'd assume he didn't, but it's weak enough that I just left it out
  * Natasha changing sides only counts as a lie to T'Challa because she attacked him before telling him. Assuming that she always planned on switching is too biased 
  * Tony as an authority figure is a slightly odd one. After S.H.I.E.L.D. falls, I'm listing him as the Avenger's #2 because he's paying the bills and I think the other Avengers would probably think of him as an Authority. But I don't think Tony sees himself as such, after all he names Steve as "the boss".
  * For the conglomerated stats, "Gov Reps" have to be good guys when telling lies (T'Chaka, Sharon Carter, Rhodes when he's acting as a Colonel, Heimdall).



**Author's Note:**

> I'm open to a round two if the comments remind me of a significant number of lies I've forgotten.


End file.
